Events:
November 1, 2017

The photographs Henri Cartier-Bresson took in India between 1947 and 1980 are quiet, self-effacing, and resolutely static. Even when he shoots in crowds, as he does at a cattle sale, there is little sense of movement or noise.

A new show at the National Portrait gallery tracks Sylvia Plath's obsession with divided selves, from her Smith senior thesis on the double in Dostoevsky, to the many masks she wore during her short lifetime.

Simon Rattle's last year as the head of the Berlin Philharmonic—he has been conducting the orchestra to great acclaim since 2002—is the last chance to see his energetic conducting style at work in the orchestra's acoustically superb concert hall.

Rachel Whiteread's work is calmly paradoxical, domestic but monumental, tactile but detached, nostalgic but austere: objects and dwellings from everyday lives are lifted to a different sphere, a dance in space.

Like many of his peers, Modigliani became fascinated by primitivism, African masks, Egyptian statues, and the 'Khmer' Buddhas of Cambodia. At the Jewish Museum in New York, an array of caryatid sketches are accompanied by stylized drawings of heads whose facial geometry seems almost obsessively serene, an unobtainable ideal.

To call MoMA's Louise Bourgeois retrospective a print show would be a little misleading. Bourgeois was forever altering her work, making additions and adjustments to printing proofs as they occurred to her in the moment, and the majority of the prints in the exhibition exist in several different states, or stages of development.

The "modern" in the title of MoMA's ambitious new survey of 20th and 21st-century clothing refers less to a period of time than to a way of relating to time itself—of dealing with and mingling the past, present, and future.

The career-spanning survey of Carolee Schneemann's paintings, films, and performances at MoMA PS1 is the first comprehensive retrospective in the US of this unpredictable and enormously influential artist.

November brings us 1945; The Terminator; adaptations both classic and obscure of Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky Brothers; black soldiers in the fight against fascism; and the lost films of postwar Germany.